Comment by pbarnes_1

7 years ago

We used to be a huge SoftLayer customer. Then they got bought by IBM and service/pricing/network/everything got worse. Then we left.

IBM sucks.

3 comments

pbarnes_1

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SwellJoe  7 years ago

Yeah, we moved out of SoftLayer soon after that acquisition, as well. They just weren't as interested in the kind of (small) money we spend and it showed.

jake_morrison  7 years ago

We were a Softlayer customer for dedicated servers before the acquisition. Afterwards, we needed to add additional servers, and IBM wanted 50% more for the same config, already quite high (twice as much as we pay elsewhere). When we needed to increase the RAM from 16GB to 32GB, they wanted $50/month for a stick of RAM that costs about $100.

It's like they are using cloud pricing as a reference for dedicated servers. We run dozens of dedicated servers, and using the cloud would be 10x the cost. Amazon at least has a culture of passing on cost savings to customers.

There was a problem with a server, and I needed to connect to the console. That involved using a VPN, then downloading a Java applet with a very specific (obsolete) version of Java. The applet didn't support copy and paste, and frequently repeated keys. Try typing in a 16 digit randomly generated root password by hand with your keyboard duplicating keypresses. Linode can offer a console over SSH, why not IBM?

Screw IBM.

  • SwellJoe  7 years ago

    "then downloading a Java applet with a very specific (obsolete) version of Java. The applet didn't support copy and paste, and frequently repeated keys"

    Ah, yes, Lantronix Spider. My current colo still uses that old bastard. It's the only reason I still have Java on one of my laptops. And, now that our colocated servers are getting old and crotchety, I'm beginning to think it's not worth it and considering moving out to some cloud-based thing (but to keep costs down we'd need to reimplement a lot of stuff, because "big box with a bunch of services running" is outrageously expensive on the major cloud-based virtual machines, compared to ~$100/month to stick a fat server in a rack and get a gigabit pipe plugged into it).